Steam powered vehicles
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Steam-powered self-propelled cars were devised in the late 18th
century. The first self-propelled car was built by Nicolas-Joseph
Cugnot in 1769, it could attain speeds of up to 6 km/h (3.7 mi/h).
In 1771 he designed another steam-driven car, which ran so fast that
it rammed into a wall, producing the world's first car accident.
A steam engine is an external combustion heat engine that makes use
of the thermal energy that exists in steam, converting it to
mechanical work. Steam engines were used as the prime mover in
pumps, locomotives, steam ships and steam tractors, and were
essential to the Industrial Revolution. They are still widely used,
particularly for electrical power generation using the steam
turbine. |
A steam engine requires a boiler to boil water to produce steam. The
expansion—or contraction—of steam exerts force upon a piston or
turbine blade, whose motion can be harnessed for the work of turning
wheels or driving other machinery. One of the advantages of the
steam engine is that any heat source can be used to raise steam in
the boiler; but the most common is a fire fueled by wood, coal or
oil or the utilization of the heat energy generated in a nuclear
reactor.
The first recorded steam device, the aeolipile, was invented by Hero
of Alexandria, a Greek, in the 1st century AD, but used only as a
toy.
In 1663, Edward Somerset, 2nd Marques of Worcester published designs
for, and may have installed, a steam-powered engine for pumping
water at Vauxhall House. In about 1687 the French physicist Denis
Papin, with the help of Gottfried Leibniz, built a working model of
a steam engine and a paddle steam boat. Papin is also credited with
a number of significant devices such as the safety valve. Sir Samuel
Morland also developed ideas for a steam engine during the same
period and built a number of steam-engine pumps for King Louis XIV
of France in the 1680s.
Early industrial steam engines were designed by Thomas Savery (the
"fire-engine", 1698) but it was Thomas Newcomen and his
"atmospheric-engine" of 1712 that demonstrated the first operational
and practical industrial engine. Together, Newcomen and Savery
developed a beam engine that worked on the atmospheric, or vacuum,
principle. The first industrial applications of the vacuum engines
were in the pumping of water from deep mineshafts. In mineshaft
pumps the reciprocating beam was connected to an operating rod that
descended the shaft to a pump chamber. The oscillations of the
operating rod are transferred to a pump piston that moves the water,
through check valves, to the top of the shaft. Early Newcomen
engines operated so slowly that the valves were manually opened and
closed by an attendant. An improvement was the replacement of manual
operation of the valves with an operation derived from the motion of
the engine itself, by lengths of rope known as "potter cord" (legend
has it that this was first done in 1713 by a boy, Humphrey Potter,
charged with opening the valves; when he grew bored he set up ropes
to automate the process.)
Humphrey Gainsborough produced a model condensing steam engine in
the 1760s, which he showed to James Watt of Glasgow Green, Scotland.
In 1769 Watt patented the first significant improvements to the
Newcomen type vacuum engine that made it much more fuel efficient.
Watt's leap was to separate the condensing phase of the vacuum
engine into a separate chamber, while keeping the piston and
cylinder at the temperature of the steam. Watt, together with his
business partner Matthew Boulton, developed these patents into the
Watt steam engine in Birmingham, England. The increased efficiency
of the Watt engine finally led to the general acceptance and use of
steam power in industry. Additionally, unlike the Newcomen engine,
the Watt engine operated smoothly enough to be connected to a drive
shaft—via sun and planet gears—to provide rotary power. In early
steam engines the piston is usually connected to a balanced beam,
rather than directly to a connecting rod, and these engines are
therefore known as beam engines.
(350 kPa). The next improvement in efficiency came with the American
Oliver Evans and the Briton Richard Trevithick's use of high
pressure steam. Trevithick built successful industrial high pressure
single-acting engines known as Cornish engines. However with
increased pressure came much danger as engines and boilers were now
likely to fail mechanically by a violent outwards explosion, and
there were many early disasters. The most important refinement to
the high pressure engine at this point was the safety valve, which
releases excess pressure. Reliable and safe operation came only with
a great deal of experience and codification of construction,
operating, and maintenance procedures.
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot demonstrated the first functional
self-propelled steam vehicle, his "fardier" (steam wagon), in 1769.
Arguably, this was the first automobile. While not generally
successful as a transportation device, the self-propelled steam
tractor proved very useful as a self mobile power source to drive
other farm machinery such as grain threshers or hay balers. In 1802
William Symington built the "first practical steamboat", and in 1807
Robert Fulton used the Watt steam engine to power the first
commercially successful steamboat. On February 21, 1804 at the
Pen-y-Darren ironworks in Wales, the first self-propelled railway
steam engine or steam locomotive, built by Richard Trevithick, was
demonstrated. |
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